Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (46 page)

He looked away, unwilling, I supposed, to acknowledge this.

“I just needed to say thank you for that. Thank you.”

“You still aren’t going to tell me why I lied for you?”

I took a deep breath. “No, I’m not. But it’s not because I don’t trust you. That may have been true before, but it’s not true now.”

He frowned at me. “So why then?”

“Because I don’t know the truth yet, not all of it. I have some more digging to do before I really know what’s going on,” I said.

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” he asked, with just the merest hint of an upward tilt to his lips.

It took me a moment to realize what he meant, but when I did, I burst out laughing. “No! No, I’m sorry, that was totally unintentional wordplay, I promise.”

“Do you also promise that this ‘digging’ won’t put you into another situation like yesterday?” he asked, serious again before I could even register the change a smile made to his features; it was so very foreign to my perception of him.

“I can’t promise that,” I said. “But I do promise that I won’t disappear again, not on purpose anyway. And if I find the answers I’m looking for, and I can confirm them, then I will tell you everything.”

He looked momentarily stunned. “You will?”

I smiled at his shock. “Yes, I will. We’re going to be stuck with each other for a good long time. We might as well make the best of it, and I think a little bit of trust is a good place to start.”

He wasn’t happy, I could see that. But the nod he gave me, devoid of satisfaction, was at least accepting. He stood up, and I handed him his shovel. He took it without a word and went back to his work. I left him to it.

§

Three nights in a row of cleaning microscopic grime off of paintings with Fiona gave me a lot of time to think, but I still couldn’t make up my mind to tell any of the other Durupinen about Neil. It wasn’t that I felt I couldn’t trust anyone; I was fairly sure that Celeste or Siobhán would want to do everything they could to help me. But I was also fairly sure that their idea of help would be to bring the information straight to the Council, and I wasn’t prepared for that. Hannah didn’t push it. She seemed to think that, as long as we stayed safely tucked away in Fairhaven, surrounded by Caomhnóir, there was no immediate danger. And as I watched them, pacing the perimeters and practicing their martial arts on the grass, I had to admit she was probably right.

I arrived back to the room Wednesday night, my eyes aching and tired, and made myself a cup of tea. Mackie and Hannah were bent over the night’s ream of Ancient Languages homework in front of the fire. I’d just settled into the chair beside them when Savvy burst into the room like a whirlwind, a triumphant expression on her face. I jumped so badly at her sudden appearance that I spilled hot tea all over myself.

“Damn it, Sav, you have GOT to stop doing that!”

Savvy ignored me and strutted into the middle of the room. “What is the one thing you’ve been wondering about for ages?” she asked.

“Why you always have to scare the crap out of us every time you enter a room?” I muttered, shrugging out of my tea-soaked sweater and crossing to the closet for a dry one.

“Go on. What’s the one thing that’s been driving you absolutely bollocking crazy?”

“Just tell us what you’re on about or sod off,” Mackie grumbled, crumpling up another sheet of paper and chucking it into the fire. “Hannah, can you please show me how to do these conditional tenses again?”

“Sure.” Hannah slid closer to Mackie, pulling a pencil from somewhere in her hair like a magician doing a sleight of hand.

“Oi!” Savvy shouted, stamping her foot. “I’m trying to tell you I found out something important! Is someone going to ask me what it is, or not?”

“Aren’t you just going to tell us anyway?” I asked.

Savvy sighed the sigh of the long-suffering and walked into the middle of the room. She extracted an enormous leather-bound book from her satchel and dropped it with a resounding thunk onto the floor between us. It generated such an impressive cloud of dust that I expected, when we had all finished coughing and blinking, that it would have disintegrated entirely.

“What is that?” I choked out.

“Do you remember that first week here, when Peyton brought your mother up in Siobhán’s class?”

“Yes,” Hannah and I said together. Not that we needed reminding.

“Well, she made that snarky comment about Bindings, and Siobhán said that there was more than one kind of Binding, and many different circumstances in which they could be used. I read it in my notes last night—yes, I take notes on occasion —and it got me thinking about the Silent Child.”

I stopped blotting my sweater and looked up at Savvy. All of the worry about Neil and the Necromancers had driven the Silent Child to the perimeters of my mind in recent days. “What about her?”

Finally getting the undivided attention she was hoping for, Sav flung herself to the floor beside the book and went on. “Well, I started thinking, didn’t I? I mean, what if Bindings could be used in reverse, right? What if, instead of putting the Binding on herself, to keep the ghosts away from her, a Durupinen could put a Binding on a particular ghost, to keep it from communicating?”

Even Mackie looked up from her work. “That sort of seems like the opposite of what we’re meant to do. I mean, we’re here for them to communicate with, aren’t we? Could we do that?”

“That was the question!” Savvy said. “So after class I went to the library—”

“Right, I’m gonna stop you right there,” Mackie said, hands raised. “Can we all just appreciate, for a brief moment, that Savvy not only knows where the library is, but entered said chamber voluntarily.”

“Will wonders never cease,” Savvy said with a dazzling grin and a wink.

“Of course I bloody well know where it is! Spent the last few nights of my life in there alphabetizing them little catalogue cards, haven’t I? And I didn’t go there voluntarily, I’ve still got detention hours to do. Anyway, after no small amount of searching, I tracked down this book.” She slapped the cover of the monstrous book and another mushroom cloud of dust blossomed from it. “And it told me everything I needed to know. I have officially solved the mystery of The Silent Child.” She looked around as though waiting for applause.

“Well, get on with it!” Mackie shouted. “What’ve you found out?”

“It’s here, listen,” Savvy said, and flipped forward into the middle of the book where she had marked a page with a torn Cadbury wrapper. “In the common course of dealings with the spirit world, the occasion may arise when a spirit who will not cross must be silenced. This is only to be expected, as spirits are often trapped in great turmoil, and cannot or will not channel their energy in a positive manner. The silencing of such a spirit may only be done in good faith, if the spirit is using its presence among the living to torment or otherwise inflict mental harm upon them. It must be borne in mind, however, that for a spirit to be silenced will cause him great distress, and should therefore be done only as a last resort, and only for the time it may take to discover another means of banishing the spirit from the presence of the living with whom he is in conflict. If, and only if, these conditions are met, the Caging may be performed.

“The Caging will sever the direct connection between the spirit and the living world. Although the spirit will still be of the living world, it will no longer be heard, and all attempts to communicate will be lost in silence and echo, unable to penetrate the boundaries of the Caging.”

Hannah’s eyes were round with horror. “That’s…terrible. We shouldn’t be able to do something like that. They come to us for help and we just…trap them?”

Mackie nodded grimly. “It does sound rather wrong. But it does say that it should only be done in emergencies, doesn’t it? Like if a spirit is tormenting someone and we can’t get it to stop.”

“I…I guess…” Hannah said, and a shiver rocked her frail shoulders.

“So this is it, isn’t it?” Savvy asked. “This is what happened to the Silent Child. Someone’s gone and performed a Caging on her and that’s why she can’t talk to you.”

“It sounds right from the description,” I said. “But it can’t be! Fiona said the Silent Child has been here for centuries. This Caging thing is only meant to be done for a short time, until you can find another solution to the problem.”

Savvy shrugged, a little too unconcernedly for my taste. “Maybe they couldn’t find another solution to the problem. Maybe they never found a way to get rid of her, so they left her Caged.”

“No way,” Hannah said at once. “Someone would have realized and let her out, surely.”

“Maybe not,” I said, hopping up and starting to pace. “Fiona was really surprised when I told her that the Silent Child had attacked me, remember? She’s never spoken to anyone before that Fiona knew of; that’s how she got her name.”

“And there are hundreds of ghosts here,” Mackie chimed in. “There always have been. It’s like they’re part of the landscape now. We hardly take notice of most of them. I’ve never stopped to wonder why a single one of them is here, have you? I just sort of took them for granted. We all do, don’t we?”

Our silence was answer enough. She was right. I’d never stopped to think about who the other ghosts were or why they had never crossed over. Their presence seemed natural at Fairhaven Hall. If the Silent Child had never tried to communicate with anyone else before, she would have just blended away into the spirit masses, trapped in plain sight. It was a terrible thought.

Hannah, who’d been reading through the marked section of the book, broke the quiet. “There are instructions here for a ceremony to break the Caging.”

“Yeah, I saw that, and it looks really bloody complicated. You’ve got to do it in the middle of night at the full moon and on consecrated ground. There are about a thousand steps to that casting,” Savvy said.

Hannah was still reading, but she was nodding her head. “Yes, it will be difficult, but not impossible. We’ve just got to follow the instructions carefully. And it needs four of us to perform it properly, one for each of the classical elements.”

“We’ve got to do it,” I said, rejoining the group and starting to read over Hannah’s shoulder. “The Silent Child is trying to tell me something, and I can’t just ignore her. If this really is what’s going on, then someone’s left this poor little girl voiceless and trapped for hundreds of years!”

“I’ll help you,” said Hannah at once.

“And me,” said Savvy.

I turned a pleading gaze on Mackie. “Come on, Mack. It takes four. We need you.”

Mackie was hesitating, as I knew she would. She was chewing on her lip, playing for time. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea. Consecrated ground in the middle of the night already puts us out of bounds and breaking curfew, and that’s before we’ve even done the casting itself.”

“I know we’ll be breaking a few rules, but this is important!”

“And what if we’re unleashing something dangerous?” Mackie asked.

I frowned at her. “What do you mean, dangerous? She’s not dangerous, she’s just a little kid.”

“That doesn’t mean she can’t be dangerous. At some point a long time ago, a Durupinen performed a Caging on that spirit for a reason, and never took it off. That sounds to me like something we might not want to mess with.”

Mackie’s expression was wary. Savvy’s face, on the other hand, was proportionally enthralled. “That sounds like exactly the kind of thing we should mess with!”

I couldn’t suppress a grin. It looked like Savvy’s penchant for rule breaking and general shenanigans of all kinds was about to pay off for once, instead of blowing up in our faces as it usually did.

“Savvy don’t be absurd, please,” Mackie spat.

“Who’s being absurd? Look, when you lot came pounding on my door and recruited me for all this, right, you made it sound like a real adventure. But so far it’s been nothing but a load of school work. I barely passed year ten, so what the hell am I doing here? I might as well have stayed home and worked in a shop or something. At least I’d be getting paid. But now we’ve got the chance to do something exciting! This is what I thought it was gonna be like! Now you’re not gonna go and spoil the only fun I’m likely to have by being all sensible, are you?”

“This isn’t about having fun,” Mackie said.

“No,” I agreed. “It’s not. It’s about doing what’s right. That little girl needs help, and I have to be the one to do it. I can’t do it without all of you. Please, Mack.”

Mackie continued to frown, but heaved a long-suffering sigh and said, “Give me the book. Let me see that casting.”

“Thank you,” I breathed.

“I’m not agreeing to anything yet,” Mackie said firmly, flipping the book open and starting to read.

§

We sat up planning well into the night, because Mackie would only agree to help if we had every detail accounted for. She also insisted that we prepare ourselves for the possibility that we might need to Cage the Silent Child again, which Hannah wasn’t too thrilled about. Neither was I, but in the end, we all had to agree that, despite my gut feeling about her, the Silent Child was a mystery, an unknown quantity, and we couldn’t predict what would happen when we broke through the original casting. We had to at least learn how to perform a Caging, and be ready to do so if need be.